From a St. Louis Public Radio Report:
The Missouri Botanical Garden has announced plans to help build an online database of the world’s plants.
Working with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, and the New York Botanical Garden, the Missouri Botanical Garden will compile information on as many as 400,000 land plant species, with the goal of having all the data available online by 2020.
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The project will build on earlier work by the Missouri Botanical Garden and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. In 2010, the two institutions launched The Plant List, an online portal containing the accepted names and synonyms of all known land plant species.
The new World Flora database will include not just names but also descriptions, images, and geographic distribution information about every plant. The Missouri Botanical Garden hopes the online database will serve as a resource for global plant conservation efforts.